Art: The Apocalypse on a Postcard

• Share

At New York's Metropolitan Museum, the drawings of Leonardo

Who were the three greatest draftsmen in the history of Western art? There would be room for argument at the lower end of the ranking (Dürer? Raphael? Ingres?). But of the first two there can be little doubt. One was Michelangelo; the other was Leonardo da Vinci. The bastard son of a Florentine notary, Leonardo was born in 1452 and died in 1519. Almost from the moment that he emerged from Verrocchio's workshop in the 1470s and began his long, peripatetic and disappointed life among the courts of Rome, Milan, France and his home town, Florence, his graphic power was a source of utter astonishment to his contemporaries. When commentators applied the adjective divino to him (as they regularly did, in a conventional way, from the beginning of the 16th century onward), they implied that his talent was godlike in a nearly literal sense: just as the creator of the physical world knows all the secrets of its structure, so Leonardo's insatiable curiosity and apparently tireless power of scrutiny and notation had raised his art to an epic level of knowledge.

It still seems epic to us. There can never be another Leonardo, because no man today can even hope to encompass as many of the available facts about the natural world and its contents within the frame of 20th century knowledge as Leonardo gathered within the frame of his own time. Such a man, today, would necessarily be the victim of specialization. But Leonardo knew more than anyone else in the late 15th century about statics, dynamics, hydraulics, geology, paleontology, optics, aerodynamics and anatomy. In the realms of craftsmanship, from the construction of domes and earthworks to the casting of cannon to batter them down, he seems to have known at least as much as any guild master. Nobody else in his time or culture had such a range of interests. Nor did anybody else share his depth of pessimism; for Leonardo, in his old age, was not Edison but King Lear, obsessed to the point of anguish by human insignificance and apocalyptic doom.

The instrument for expressing all this was his drawing. The existing corpus of Leonardo's drawings and notes is no more than a fragment of his life's work, now mutilated and dispersed; still, it runs to thousands of pages, some 600 of which are in the collection of the English royal family at Windsor Castle. In aesthetic terms the Windsor drawings are of incomparable interest, not least because they include so many of Leonardo's most developed studies of inanimate nature-plants, landscapes, the effects of weather and light. A group of 50 of these nature studies (including his "deluge" drawings) is now on view at New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art, after having been shown during the winter at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Malibu, Calif. To these, the Met has added a group of Leonardo drawings and some related prints from its own collection. The show is curated by the leading active expert in Leonardo studies, Carlo Pedretti, with a catalogue preface by his predecessor in that role, Kenneth Clark. The result is a triumph of connoisseurship and presentation, as well as a demonstration of the real meaning of the verb "to draw."